Unlike Hillary Clinton, who used the same title for her memoir, Hanif Kureishi attaches a question mark to What Happened?, making clear that this collection of essays and stories is an interrogation of the recent past and not merely a dispassionate account of events. There is a note of incredulity, too, in his question, and this desire to comprehend and come to terms with the cultural and political shifts of the past decade runs through the book.
What Happened? serves as a postscript to Kureishi’s Collected Essays, published in 2011, which brought together the best of his journalism and nonfiction over the previous three decades. Many of the pieces here revisit similar themes and preoccupations, particularly around ideas of race, religion and cultural identity. Why Should We Do What God Says? and Fanatics, Fundamentalists and Fascists cast an eye back to the 1989 fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie, and the far-reaching ripples of that event for free speech, the western perception of Islam, and the hardening and polarising of ideologies. “The contemporary view of Muslims is the mirror image of the current far-right ideology overtaking the west: sexist, homophobic, insular, monocultural, combative,” he writes in the latter piece, before calling for a different kind of radicalism among the young, a movement of solidarity to tackle the creeping fascism and fearful power-grabbing of their elders. “The formerly excluded and deterritorialised could become an organised class of enlightened, educated young people prepared to join with others across Europe to struggle for freedom, equality and social change.” This is exactly the kind of unifying cause embodied by the recent climate movement, though he doesn’t mention it; one of the greatest frustrations of the book – a fault it shares with the Collected Essays – is that the pieces are not dated. It would have been interesting to follow the evolution of his ideas, or to place them in a more precise context.
This would be particularly useful where essays are responses to specific events. We Are the Pollutants addresses Penguin Books’ public commitment to greater diversity, and looks back at the battles he had to fight in his own career across publishing, film and television, industries “more or less entirely dominated by white Oxbridge men”. Here Kureishi identifies firmly with those whose voices have been excluded, talking throughout of “we” and “us” (one TV producer early in his career told him “if [your characters] were white, we’d make this”). This claim to outsider status is somewhat undermined by subsequent pieces that begin: “One night, my friend Stephen Frears and I went on a boat trip down the Bosphorus with about a dozen models…”; or “One of the first and most important pieces of advice David Bowie ever gave me…”
There’s a deliberate, tongue-in-cheek self-satirising to the name-dropping, obviously, and the pieces collected here reflect Kureishi’s sharp eye for multiple perspectives born of his own experience, whether he is discussing Antigone, Freud or Mad Men. But perhaps most memorable are the few short stories scattered throughout, in particular She Said He Said, a portrait of two marriages and a shift in sexual politics, deftly captured in a few short pages with all the author’s customary comedy and sympathy.
• What Happened? by Hanif Kureishi is published by Faber (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
